► People around the world have become more connected thanks to the rise of social technology. As a result, that same technology has allowed us to…
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▼ People around the world have become more connected thanks to the rise of social technology. As a result, that same technology has allowed us to witness the amount of violence and disastrous events that people around the world are experiencing. Civilians in Syria are constantly caught between rebel forces and the Syrian government's army with no way of knowing where the next attack will be. People in Colorado had to wait for news updates on the wildfires of 2012 to make critical decisions on whether to evacuate or stay in their homes. A man in Mexico had all his personal belongings stolen at gunpoint when he came across a cartel-enforced blockade on his way to the grocery store. All these situations could have been avoided if those people had information about dangerous locations right away to help them make decisions. Civilians themselves who have just experienced the danger have valuable information that they can share to help other people avoid the same situation.
This thesis presents a tool called Urban Forecast that can help citizens avoid dangerous locations and events by posting it on a map in the application and having it notify every other user around that area. Initial results suggest that Urban Forecast is effective at helping people avoid dangerous situations. Future designs based on results are also presented. The focus of this thesis is not entirely on the technology, but on the impact that it has on society in a hostile environment.

► This thesis reports on the use of verified Twitter accounts during crisis events. Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to broadcast…
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▼ This thesis reports on the use of verified Twitter accounts during crisis events. Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to broadcast and exchange public text messages and it can be used as a communication tool during crisis events. Verified Twitter accounts are those accounts that Twitter has investigated and found to be genuinely maintained by the claimed owner. Celebrities, public officials, and other well-known persons or companies often seek this account status. The owners of these accounts are likely to provide more accurate or relevant information during a crisis event because they represent a brand, whether themselves or an organization.
To study the role verified Twitter accounts play in a crisis event, information was collected from Twitter’s API (Application Programming Interface) from February 28, 2018 through March 3, 2018 during a powerful storm on the East Coast of the United States called a Nor’easter. Through data collection and analysis, this thesis describe show verified Twitter accounts communicated during a crisis event. Three exploratory questions were proposed to better understand the use of verified Twitter accounts: Who are the verified Twitter users that tweet about a crisis event? What types of information do verified Twitter users tweet about a crisis event? When do verified Twitter users tweet about a crisis event? Results show that verified Twitter accounts create more original messages, share more informative messages, and spread less spam than their non-verified counterparts.
Advisors/Committee Members: Amanda Hughes, Vladimir Kulyukin, Xiaojun Qi, ;.

► Emergency response agencies, which operate as command-and-control organizations, push information to members of the public with too few mechanisms to support communication flowing back.…
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▼ Emergency response agencies, which operate as command-and-control organizations, push information to members of the public with too few mechanisms to support communication flowing back. Recently, information communication technologies (ICTs) such as social media have challenged this one-way model by allowing the public to participate in emergency response in new and unexpected ways. These developments place new pressure on emergency managers to release information over social media streams, monitor online activities during an emergency event, incorporate information provided by members of the public into response efforts, and engage in the public conversation around an event. Within US emergency response organizations, public information officers (PIOs) are in a unique position to use these emerging communication technologies. PIOs are responsible for communicating official response information to members of the public during an emergency event and ensuring that the information available in the public arena is accurate and complete. In this dissertation work, I examine how social media and the forms of public participation enabled by it are changing the role of the PIO. Based on this understanding, I explore ICT solutions for the PIO through human-centered methods that include the PIO in the design process. Finally, I design, implement, and evaluate a software application informed by this work that supports the social media needs of PIOs. With the aim of improving emergency response efforts, I demonstrate how empirically-based understandings of emergency management work can inform technology design, practice, and policy. This dissertation research provides the following contributions: (1) an examination of PIOs' roles and the sociotechnical environment in which they work; (2) a new model of PIO communication that takes into account new communication pathways that have been enabled by ICT; (3) a set of requirements for supporting PIO social media communication needs; (4) the design, implementation, and evaluation of a tool – the PIO Monitoring Application – that supports the social media monitoring, documenting, reporting, and organizing needs of PIOs during an emergency event; (5) a description of the likely future role of PIOs and how that role might be supported.
Advisors/Committee Members: Leysia Palen, Kenneth M. Anderson, Clayton Lewis, Michael Muller, Katie Siek.

Hughes, A. L. (2012). Supporting the Social Media Needs of Emergency Public Information Officers with Human-Centered Design and Development. (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Colorado. Retrieved from http://scholar.colorado.edu/csci_gradetds/54

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Hughes, Amanda Lee. “Supporting the Social Media Needs of Emergency Public Information Officers with Human-Centered Design and Development.” 2012. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Colorado. Accessed May 25, 2019.
http://scholar.colorado.edu/csci_gradetds/54.

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Hughes, Amanda Lee. “Supporting the Social Media Needs of Emergency Public Information Officers with Human-Centered Design and Development.” 2012. Web. 25 May 2019.

Vancouver:

Hughes AL. Supporting the Social Media Needs of Emergency Public Information Officers with Human-Centered Design and Development. [Internet] [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Colorado; 2012. [cited 2019 May 25].
Available from: http://scholar.colorado.edu/csci_gradetds/54.

Council of Science Editors:

Hughes AL. Supporting the Social Media Needs of Emergency Public Information Officers with Human-Centered Design and Development. [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of Colorado; 2012. Available from: http://scholar.colorado.edu/csci_gradetds/54

4.
Szabó, Erika.
Public organizations and social media : An exploration of the Skellefteå Cryptosporidium Crisis.

► Events like earthquakes, terrorist attacks, water contamination etc. have drawn an increased attention on the way crisis preparedness can be improved by citizens, authorities…
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▼Events like earthquakes, terrorist attacks, water contamination etc. have drawn an increased attention on the way crisis preparedness can be improved by citizens, authorities and society as a whole. Current research has highlighted the importance of social media in crisis communication and why social media are important, but neglects to describe how social media is used by public organizations during crisis situations. By studying a particular crisis situation in a municipal organization, this thesis investigates how public organizations organize to collect and share information with the use of social media during crisis events. The results show that social media enabled fast response to citizens, due to the coordination and collaboration ability within the municipality. The importance of an existing digital strategy is recognized, for proper managing of social media as response to sudden change.

► In the aftermath of mass emergencies, a large number of pets are displaced from their families. Pet reunification in crisis situations is therefore a…
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▼ In the aftermath of mass emergencies, a large number of pets are displaced from their families. Pet reunification in crisis situations is therefore a serious problem. A number of digital volunteers were seen participating in interactions on social media services such as Facebook and Twitter with the intention of pet to family reunification. We are developing software to aid the members of the public with these activities, EmergencyPetMatcher (EPM), a collaborative web application that aims to help connect people with their lost pets. The goal of this thesis is to develop algorithms and monitoring capabilities to identify those digital volunteers (within EPM) who are actively involved with pet reunification and amplify/augment their actions to be more effective and to encourage them to continue to participate in the system.
Advisors/Committee Members: Kenneth M. Anderson, Leysia Palen, James H. Martin.

Rajiv, A. (2013). Analyzing User Behavior on Facebook's "Hurricane Sandy Lost and Found Pets" Page to Improve Support for Pet Matching in Crisis Informatics Applications. (Masters Thesis). University of Colorado. Retrieved from http://scholar.colorado.edu/csci_gradetds/77

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Rajiv, Amrutha. “Analyzing User Behavior on Facebook's "Hurricane Sandy Lost and Found Pets" Page to Improve Support for Pet Matching in Crisis Informatics Applications.” 2013. Masters Thesis, University of Colorado. Accessed May 25, 2019.
http://scholar.colorado.edu/csci_gradetds/77.

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Rajiv, Amrutha. “Analyzing User Behavior on Facebook's "Hurricane Sandy Lost and Found Pets" Page to Improve Support for Pet Matching in Crisis Informatics Applications.” 2013. Web. 25 May 2019.

Vancouver:

Rajiv A. Analyzing User Behavior on Facebook's "Hurricane Sandy Lost and Found Pets" Page to Improve Support for Pet Matching in Crisis Informatics Applications. [Internet] [Masters thesis]. University of Colorado; 2013. [cited 2019 May 25].
Available from: http://scholar.colorado.edu/csci_gradetds/77.

Council of Science Editors:

Rajiv A. Analyzing User Behavior on Facebook's "Hurricane Sandy Lost and Found Pets" Page to Improve Support for Pet Matching in Crisis Informatics Applications. [Masters Thesis]. University of Colorado; 2013. Available from: http://scholar.colorado.edu/csci_gradetds/77

► There is high demand for techniques and tools to process and analyze large sets of streaming data in both industrial and academic settings. While…
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▼ There is high demand for techniques and tools to process and analyze large sets of streaming data in both industrial and academic settings. While existing work in this area has focused on a wide range of issues including persistence technologies, advanced analysis tools, functional web interfaces, and the like, I focus on query support. In particular, I focus on providing analysts flexibility with respect to the types of queries they can make on large data sets, in real time as well as over historical data. I am building a lightweight service-based framework—EPIC Real-Time—that manages a set of queries that can be applied to user-initiated data analysis events (such as studying tweets generated during a disaster). My prototype combines stream processing and batch processing techniques inspired by the approach embodied in the Lambda Architecture. I investigate a core set of query types that can answer the wide range of queries asked by analysts who study crisis events. For this research, I design and develop a flexible set of real-time analytical tools that will allow analysts to ask new types of questions as they move their research activity from after a crisis to analysis during an event. This will enable them to monitor online social behaviors and capture interesting interactions in real-time across the various phases of a disaster. In this dissertation, I present a prototype implementation of EPIC Real-Time which makes use of message-driven and reactive programming techniques. I also present a performance evaluation on how efficiently the real-time and batch-oriented queries perform, how well these queries meet the needs of Project EPIC analysts, and provide insight into how EPIC Real-Time performs along a number of non-functional requirements important for big data, such as performance, usability, scalability, and reliability.
Advisors/Committee Members: Kenneth M. Anderson, Richard Han, Tom Yeh, Qin Lv, Kai Larsen.

► Displacement of pets in and after disaster events is a serious matter to families and creates public safety and health issues at large. During…
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▼ Displacement of pets in and after disaster events is a serious matter to families and creates public safety and health issues at large. During and after Hurricane Katrina, an estimated 200,000 pets were displaced from their guardians, with only five percent of these pets ever being reunited with their guardians. One of the major obstacles to successful pet-to-family reunification is the large search space individuals must navigate in search of lost pets. Grounded in the theory of crisisinformatics, which studies how people use information communication technology (ICT) in crisis, this work leverages the phenomenon of digital volunteerism to better address the problem of pet-to-family reunification. This effort culminates in the form of No Place Like Home, which is an online platform for use by digital volunteers interesting in aiding pet-to-family reunification efforts in a disaster. This work describes this system in terms of its design features and software architecture. The primary design features of the system are an accessible user interface, collaboration mechanisms (in the form of social network support and chat rooms), and social capital. The other key feature of this system is how it incorporates human computation (performed by the crowd of digital volunteers) with machine computation (performed by information retrieval and classification systems) in a collaborative manner which plays to the strengths of each type of computation. An evaluation of the machine learning components of the system in an experimental setting reveals that the positioning of machine computation as supporting the larger activities of digital volunteers is promising. With this validation, the system is poised for future public deployment in a disaster scenario and further study.
Advisors/Committee Members: Leysia Palen, Kenneth Anderson, James Martin.

► Social media have experienced widespread adoption in recent years. Though designed and appropriated for a range of purposes, users are consistently turning to these…
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▼ Social media have experienced widespread adoption in recent years. Though designed and appropriated for a range of purposes, users are consistently turning to these platforms during times of crisis and mass disruption – a term used here to characterize events, including mass emergencies, natural disasters and political protests, that cause significant disruption to normal routines. Social media are playing host to new, digital forms of the social convergence behavior long known to occur in the wake of crisis events. This activity, which includes participation from local citizens, emergency responders, and global onlookers alike, produces huge volumes of data, some with potential value to affected people and responders. It also creates new challenges. Noise, misinformation, lost context and the unstructured nature of social media updates all contribute to an emerging information processing problem, with information seekers forced to "drink from the firehose" to identify the data they need.
Noting the difficulties of completely solving this problem with purely computational solutions, I address the challenge of processing social media updates into usable information from a perspective that positions the participating crowd as an asset in the effort. At the center of this inquiry is the discovery of an emerging role for remote participants during mass disruption events – that of the digital volunteer. This dissertation consists of four separate studies of digital volunteerism and other forms of remote participation, examining several ways members of the remote crowd help to organize information during mass disruption events. Across the different studies, I employ a mixture of methods, including qualitative and quantitative analysis of large volumes of Twitter data, interviews with digital volunteers, and participant observation within a virtual volunteer organization.
Integrating the findings from these separate studies, I introduce a new term, crowdwork, to describe the productive activity of remote participants during mass disruption events. Throughout, this dissertation works to unpack the popular crowdsourcing term, by identifying salient features of crowdwork in this context and comparing those with current understandings of crowdsourcing. Examining the larger ecosystem of digital volunteerism during mass disruption events, I describe crowdwork in this context as a multilevel filtration system, explaining how information is processed through a variety of different activities at different layers within a complex information space that includes crowdworkers, virtual organizations, and social media sites that host both the information and the information processing. This model identifies several potential "sites" of innovation where computational algorithms could both support and leverage crowdwork.
Finally, from another perspective, I examine crowdwork through the movement and transformation of information. Using the theory of distributed cognition in combination with this information-centered…
Advisors/Committee Members: Leysia Palen, John K. Bennett, Edwin Hutchins, Michele H. Jackson, Clayton Lewis.

▼ This dissertation analyzes Californians' information infrastructure after three Bay Area earthquakes: 1868 Hayward Fault Earthquake, 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, and 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. I use qualitative and historical research approaches, focusing on documents produced by state and local governments, newspapers and letters by Californians. In my analysis, I employ the construct of "information infrastructure" from the field of Science and Technology Studies to describe the complex constellation of practices, technology and institutions that underpins the public sphere. Four themes help develop the idea of public information infrastructure: continuity, reach, informational authority and multiple infrastructures. First, major disruptions such as earthquakes challenge the continuity of public information infrastructure while making infrastructure visible. For example, after the 1906 earthquake and fire, refugees had to reassemble their social geography. Friends, loved ones, employers and employees all wanted to locate each other and notify others of their well-being. While the physical information infrastructure was destroyed, the ways that people worked and organized was not. Thus, with some work-arounds, information infrastructure within San Francisco was reassembled to working order. Second, I look at one of the qualities of information infrastructure that is considered fundamental - that of the reach of infrastructure across space. In 1868, the circulation of documents to far away audiences shaped the earthquake narrative locally. Third, I examine claims to informational authority. My dissertation begins in 1868, at a time when there were not shared scientific earthquake descriptors such as magnitude, when it took weeks for a newspaper to travel from San Francisco to New York, and when there was no professionalized class of "responders" or specialized government response. The Chamber of Commerce claimed the authority to explain the earthquake. The bureaucratization of disaster response and the rise of scientific explanations for earthquakes shaped infrastructure and information practices, such that by the 1989 earthquake government officials claimed the authority to explain what had happened. The intertwining of science, the state, and infrastructure helped constitute and legitimize a new set of informational authorities, and provide a lens with which to design post-disaster information systems and policy today. Last, I argue that there is not just one information infrastructure, but multiple infrastructures supporting multiple publics. Alternate infrastructures supported Chinese people in 1906 and Spanish-speakers in 1989 when attempting to get aid or find loved ones. My research ties together how technology, media organizations, government institutions, and scientific explanations of earthquakes contribute to a sensemaking epistemology for Californians.

► Disasters arising from natural hazards are associated with breakdown of existing structures, but they also result in creation of new social ties in the…
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▼ Disasters arising from natural hazards are associated with breakdown of existing structures, but they also result in creation of new social ties in the process of self-organization and problem solving by those affected. This dissertation focuses on emergent forms of sociality that arise in the context of crisis. Specifically, it considers collaborative work practices, social network structures, and organizational forms that emerge on social media during disasters arising from natural hazards. Social media platforms support highly-distributed social environments, and the forms of sociality that emerge in these contexts are affected by the affordances of their technical features, especially those that more or less successfully facilitate the creation of a shared information space. Thus, this dissertation is organized around two important aspects of social media spaces: the availability of an explicitly-shared site of work and the availability of a visible, legible record of activity. This dissertation investigates the forms of sociality that emerge during disasters in three social media activities: retweeting, crisis mapping in OpenStreetMap (OSM), and Twitter reply conversations. These three social media activities highlight various availability of an explicitly-shared site of work and visible record of activity. The studies of retweeting and reply conversations investigate the Twitter activity in response to the 2012 Hurricane Sandy—the second costliest hurricane in US history and the most tweeted about event to date at the time. Analysis of crisis mapping in OpenStreetMap—an open, editable, volunteer-based map of the world—focuses on the OSM activity after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which was the first major disaster event supported by OpenStreetMap. For these investigations, the dissertation elaborates and develops human-centered data science methods—a set of methodological approaches that both harness the power of computational techniques and account for the highly-situated nature of the social activity in crisis. Finally, the dissertation positions the findings from the three studies within the larger context of high-tempo, high-volume social media activity and highlights how the framework of the two intersecting dimensions of the shared information space reveals larger patterns within the emergent forms of sociality across contexts.
Advisors/Committee Members: Leysia Palen, Aaron Clauset, Clayton Lewis, Jed Brubaker, Mor Naaman.

In the spring of 2017, Sweden experienced a crisis when the most deadly act of terrorism since 1940 occured; a truck drove through a crowd of people on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, hitting several people and killing five. The event spread rapidly in social media and the circulating information was in part unconfirmed data that later turned out to be incorrect. The purpose of this study was to generate recommendations regarding emergency communicators’ proactive work against false information and the spreading of rumors on social media, while at the same time be a foundation for future studies within crisisinformatics. To achieve this purpose six respondents from Krisinformation.se and the Swedish police were interviewed and a timeline (Bilaga 3) was created in order to clarify the chain of events on social media during the act of terrorism. Analysis of data from the aggregated material has resulted in ten recommended measures applicable to proactive work against false information and spreading of rumors in social media. Measures that can be applied generally to actors within crisis management. These measures were: Practice; Monitor; Create material; Be quick, Be correct; Be present; Respond to rumors; Be available; Educate; Crowdsource.

In the spring of 2017, Sweden experienced a crisis when the most deadly act of terrorism since 1940 occured; a truck drove through a crowd of people on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, hitting several people and killing five. The event spread rapidly in social media and the circulating information was in part unconfirmed data that later turned out to be incorrect. The purpose of this study was to generate recommendations regarding emergency communicators’ proactive work against false information and the spreading of rumors on social media, while at the same time be a foundation for future studies within crisisinformatics. To achieve this purpose six respondents from Krisinformation.se and the Swedish police were interviewed and a timeline (Bilaga 3) was created in order to clarify the chain of events on social media during the act of terrorism. Analysis of data from the aggregated material has resulted in ten recommended measures applicable to proactive work against false information and spreading of rumors in social media. Measures that can be applied generally to actors within crisis management. These measures were: Practice; Monitor; Create material; Be quick, Be correct; Be present; Respond to rumors; Be available; Educate; Crowdsource.

► This paper investigates publics that emerge on Twitter in response to crisis events, referred to in this study as response publics, using mass shootings in…
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▼ This paper investigates publics that emerge on Twitter in response to crisis events, referred to in this study as response publics, using mass shootings in the United States of America as cases for this study. Research is based on over 3 million shooting-related tweets from October 8, 2016 to January 6, 2017, and 131 mass shooting events; 118 occurring within the timespan of the tweets and 13 major mass shootings that occurred in the past. Three response publics are identified and explored: (1) Exploitive, (2) Peripheral, and (3) Event Centric. Their typologies are characterized through analyzing relationships amongst the contents of circulated information, its relation to the shooting event or the context in which the shooting can be situated, and how metadata is leveraged to concentrate attention or create associations. Data visualization is used as a tool for qualitative analysis, providing a legible viewpoint from which more deliberate views are made to answer more informed questions.

…broadcast information to contribute in shared goals around crisis
events. We can understand this… …consisting of selfreporting from individuals close to the crisis event, either physically
or… …crisis events when information is either
inaccessible or undesirable to mainstream sources… …perspectives are particularly valuable in
times of crisis because individuals from different places… …adhere to other contexts or crisis events, via hashtags,
often comprising ad hoc formations…

▼ Web 2.0 (social media) provides a natural platform for
dynamic emergence of citizen (as) sensor communities, where the
citizens generate content for sharing information and engaging in
discussions. Such a citizen sensor community (CSC) has stated or
implied goals that are helpful in the work of formal organizations,
such as an emergency management unit, for prioritizing their
response needs. This research addresses questions related to design
of a cooperative system of organizations and citizens in CSC. Prior
research by social scientists in a limited offline and online
environment has provided a foundation for research on cooperative
behavior challenges, including 'articulation' and 'awareness', but
Web 2.0 supported CSC offers new challenges as well as
opportunities. A CSC presents information overload for the
organizational actors, especially in finding reliable information
providers (for awareness), and finding actionable information from
the data generated by citizens (for articulation). Also, we note
three data level challenges: ambiguity in interpreting
unconstrained natural language text, sparsity of user behaviors,
and diversity of user demographics. Interdisciplinary research
involving social and computer sciences is essential to address
these socio-technical issues.I present a novel web
information-processing framework, called the Identify-Match- Engage
(IME) framework. IME allows operationalizing computation in design
problems of awareness and articulation of the cooperative system
between citizens and organizations, by addressing data problems of
group engagement modeling and intent mining. The IME framework
includes: a.) Identification of cooperation-assistive intent
(seeking-offering) from short, unstructured messages using a
classification model with declarative, social and contrast pattern
knowledge, b.) Facilitation of coordination modeling using
bipartite matching of complementary intent (seeking-offering), and
c.) Identification of user groups to prioritize for engagement by
defining a content-driven measure of 'group discussion
divergence'.The use of prior knowledge and interplay of features of
users, content, and network structures efficiently captures context
for computing cooperation-assistive behavior (intent and
engagement) from unstructured social data in the online
socio-technical systems. Our evaluation of a use-case of the crisis
response domain shows improvement in performance for both intent
classification and group engagement prioritization. Real world
applications of this work include use of the engagement interface
tool during various recent crises including the 2014 Jammu and
Kashmir floods, and intent classification as a service integrated
by the crisis mapping pioneer Ushahidi's CrisisNET project for
broader impact.
Advisors/Committee Members: Sheth, Amit (Committee Chair).